Beloved
my wife
in this dust-weary world of
so much depravity
why do you
choose me alone to endure

The June Fourth Elegies are a powerful but limited collection. The strength is that they bear witness to state atrocity and maintain the memory. There may be a lack of success in the certainty displayed. I don’t suggest there is a question about the events described. It is more an instance of such being delineated in absolute terms, bereft of any human doubt or error. It is only in the late middle section detailing the decadence of the late 1990s that humanity is understood in terms outside of yearning martyrs. This verse is uncomfortable as it should be. ( )

Reading June Fourth Elegies was something of an ordeal. Not because Lui's poetry is bad (it isn't), but because of the unrelenting, unstinting, non-blinking twenty-year stare down the wrong end of a gun barrel, at the blood dripping off a bayonet's edge, at the bloody smears left on the pavement of Tiananmen Square by tank tracks, and at the despair felt by the poet over the lives lost to authoritarian oppression, at the collective wilful forgetting of what happened on a day seared into his memory. There are some words of beauty in Liu's poetry, but they are stark and cold.

Having finished the book, by an effort of will getting through the middle section, determined not to look away, I'm left with a heavy feeling of oppression. Lui's annual return to the subject of massacre and murder, of senseless loss, and grief, and mourning, and self-recrimination, speak of the deep and unhealed trauma he suffered at Tiananmen that June fourth, of the survivor's guilt he carried with him out of the Square, and the subsequent years of harsh imprisonment and harassment.

These certainly aren't poems to be read for relaxation, nor to be poured over for exquisite turns of phrase. They are often oblique and difficult to follow due to the almost complete lack of punctuation; they're also viscerally effective, and claustrophobic in the intensity of despairing emotion spilled by Liu onto the page. ( )

Very depressing. Interesting poetry. But very depressing. ( )

Very depressing. Interesting poetry. But very depressing. ( )

Very depressing. Interesting poetry. But very depressing. ( )